Why did you decide to write this essay? What was your intention for the essay when you started, and how did that evolve over time (if it did)? Was anything surprising to you? How long did it take you to write this? We’re interested in two answers: (1) over what time period you were ‘working’ on the essay—from idea to final draft—and (2) how long it literally took you to write the essay (the time you spent typing/revising/editing). What was the process you used to writ...

I got access to GPT-6 Astra this afternoon, so naturally I used it to generate SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles - at low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning levels (Astra doesn't support reasoning=none). Then I rendered those pelicans in a comparison grid with GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, and beyond being fun the result was surprisingly useful. See the grid for full quality images. Here's the transcript that created the GPT-6 Nova pelicans. There are a few interesting things tha...

In June I purchased this TrueTime XL-AK time server , so I could learn more of the history of GPS-based time. I received it on June 22, and just 16 days later a similar GPS time server took down Australia's cell service for 12 hours ! I made a short video about it but put off digging into the TrueTime... until now. Over the past couple weeks, I've 'restomodded' this device with a Raspberry Pi, to build a stratum 1 NTP Time server, which I'd like to eventually add to the NTP Pool . ...

Discovering and supporting all of the wild semantics for local variables in Ruby was so interesting that the ZJIT team decided to write a paper about it: Support Local Variables (PDF). It’s also the first bit of academic literature that documents and explains ZJIT. It’s published at VMIL 2026, where someone on our team will be presenting it. Abstract Ruby is a dynamically typed and object-oriented programming language. Its primary implementation, CRuby, contains a bytecode vir...

Weapons, weapons, weapons. War needs weapons. If you shoot a lot of missiles, you need to build more. If you drop a lot of bombs, you need to build more. Weapons kill the enemy. Kill the enemy and you seize terrain and accomplish your objective. A straightforward concept, easy to understand for any citizen, business leader, politician, or warfighter. But where do the weapons go? What targets do we employ them against? How are those targets found? How hard are they to find? What is the machine ...

0.0 Context setting It’s Wednesday 2 September in Portland, Oregon, where it was the first day back at school which also meant it was time to start raining again. We made it on time! That was a big achievement, back pats and handshakes all around everyone. I started writing this episode a good four days ago on 29 August, and jeez has it been weighing on my mind in a very you should have finished this and sent it already sense. For anyone with the belief that writing this newsletter is e...

The difference between a medicine and a poison is dosage. Often we talk about certain habits, in programming or life, are good or bad. But few things are simple binaries. Some vary with context: reading a book is a good thing sitting in my garden, but not while driving my car. But another variable is dosage: a little pain-killer salves my headache, but too much will kill me. The importance of dosage was noticed by a 16th century Swiss physician called Paracelsus. His quote was or...

Static Allocation, Constant Work Sep 2, 2026 In reply to this email: Memory Safety’s Hardest Problem named something I’d hit but couldn’t articulate. Your case is a pointer into one union variant surviving a write of a different variant, so live typed pointers end up reading bytes that belong to something else now. Last year I wrote a limit-order matching engine and shipped a use-after-free: a cancelled order was released back to the pool while it was still linked into its ...

Spring Waters by Vilhelms Purvitis, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at SpaceX’s turbine blade factory, Fervo’s deal with Google, Delhi’s cheap metro, why recycling is overrated, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities Claims that increased immigration raids on residential construc...

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Shopify ended 2025 with roughly 7,600 employees, about 500 fewer than a year earlier, while revenue rose 30% to $11.556 billion. The company runs a remote-first workforce with no office requirement. This post covers Shopify employee statistics for 2026: headcount from SEC filings, regional and functional splits, median pay, hiring velocity and output per head. Every figure carries its source and period. Shopify Employee Statistics 7,600 Employees worldwide as of December 31, 2025, per Sh...

At the end of the previous note , I (Alex) promised that the next one would be about hands : the Morphic objects that stand in for each user’s cursor, and the mechanism we built to stream fast-changing state, like the position of a morph being dragged, to other users without piling operations into the Automerge document. That note is still coming. But Dan pointed out, correctly, that hands are only one piece of a Morphic world we’ve been referring to throughout this series (morphs, halos, ...

Richard Stearns (right) and Juris Hartmanis in May 1963. The main theorem from their seminal paper is on the blackboard. Stearns sent Lance this picture to help  celebrate the 50th anniversary of the paper . Richard Stearns died on August 29, 2026 .  Readers of this blog probably know him from the Hartmanis-Stearns paper On the computational complexity of algorithms which appeared in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society in 1965, and his paper with F. C. Hennie that gave ...

I had a splendid time in Stratford upon Avon for the premier of Duncan Macmillan and Dominic Cooke’s epic new stage production of Game of Thrones: The Mad King. And furthermore I’m thrilled to announce that the production will be moving on to London to share the experience with a wider audience. New venue and premiere dates will be announced in due course, and if you would like to hear about new information feel free to sign-up at: www.gameofthronesonstage.com It promises to be an e...

it is your primary job as a founder to find people who care about the problem you’re solving, tell them about your solution, and convert them to get sales. one reliable method that has been working well is to steal engagement from people talking about the exact problem I’m solving already. i.e. using social media to find people who’ve engaged with posts on my topic and reaching out to them. Here’s how that worked: almost a 2.5x better response rate! Tbh, this almost feels ...

I started off this year writing a lot, and wanted to keep up the pace. I did good at first! And then… I didn’t manage to. In some ways, this is because I have just been super busy! I’ve never had less free time, and I’m okay with that. There’s a tremendous amount of good things going on in my life. But it’s also put this whole Claude Code series in an awkward spot, because things have been changing so rapidly, that it’s been hard to keep up. And I also need to figure out what i...

A few weeks ago I felt like it would be fun to see if I can make one of those cheap Chinese CarPlay dongles run something other than the stock firmware. The idea was that rather than just forwarding CarPlay, why not do something more interesting with them? They all work quite similarly: they act as bridges between your car and the phone. From there they deal with video and audio streams and pass some other data through. Most of them also bring up a custom UI for pairing and have a web interf...

I decided I was bored with the previous design, but wanted something that was in keeping with the previous design (brutalist and using a monospace font) yet different. I abandoned the yellow accent and went back to blue, my favourite colour. I also changed the font to Victor Mono. I like how the new design draws from different versions of the site's history - lots of neo-brutalist design, clean colours and font, plus a bit of whimsy. If you're reading this via RSS, here's what the new design...

Every time I launch Thunderbird to read my RSS feeds, I’m reminded that not one, but two people I follow have the same names as friends who are no longer with us. I noticed this on Mastodon too, before I took my current social media hiatus. It’s… oddly nice to see them still going? Even though I know it’s not “them”. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-09-04. Every time I launch Thunderbird to read my RSS feeds, I’m reminded that not one, but two people I follow have the sam...

rabbits leaping, birds tweeting, the sun rising, hills welcoming, breeze blowing, paths winding, potential painting, colours calming: skies awakening, day breaking. rabbits leaping, birds tweeting, the sun rising, hills welcoming, breeze blowing, paths winding, potential painting, colours calming: skies awakening, day breaking. rabbits leaping, birds tweeting, the sun rising, hills welcoming, breeze blowing, paths winding, potential painting, colours calming: skies awakening, day breaking.

Mathematicians are witnessing a profound shift in their field. AI systems are now producing proofs, spotting connections between distant fields, and, in a few cases, solving problems that had stumped mathematicians for decades. The pace of progress over the past several months has raised challenging questions: What can AI systems actually do? And what happens to the more human… Source Mathematicians are witnessing a profound shift in their field. AI systems are now producing proofs, spottin...

A lot of people think that good leadership requires radical responsibility . Conscious Leadership defines it like this: Taking full responsibility for one’s circumstances (physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually) is the foundation of true personal and relational transformation. Conscious leadership and teams take full responsibility – radical responsibility – instead of placing blame. This means locating the cause and control of our lives in ourselves, not in external even...

Exploring the performance of byte-pair encoding by optimizing a GPT-2 tokenizer. Exploring the performance of byte-pair encoding by optimizing a GPT-2 tokenizer.